Has there ever been a better stage adaptation of a novel than this one by Christopher Hampton? He took an epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos from 1782 and created a drama full of symmetry, sex and style. Even if Josie Rourke’s revival cannot totally trump memories of the original 1985 production, or indeed the 1988 movie, it is still an evening to richly savour.

Christopher Hampton: ‘I always felt Laclos was winking at you’

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What shocks even now is the sight of two French aristocrats using sex as an instrument of revenge. The action is propelled by the Marquise de Merteuil who challenges her ex-lover, the Vicomte de Valmont, to seduce the convent-reared, 15-year-old Cecile: her motive is simply to get her own back on Cecile’s future fiance by whom she herself was once dumped. But, while Valmont accomplishes his task with negligent ease, his prime target is Madame de Tourvel, the loyal wife of a provincial magistrate, whom he determines to undo. In the process, the heartless Valmont finds himself helplessly ensnared by love.

The story’s real irony, beautifully brought out by Hampton’s magnificent text and Rourke’s production, is that both Valmont and Merteuil are still fatally attracted to each other: even though the Marquise claims “card-sharps don’t sit at the same table”, you still feel the ache of jealousy behind their manoeuvres. Tom Scutt’s design also reinforces the point that the play is about the terminal exhaustion of a decadent regime: I was sorry to miss the final silhouette of the guillotine, specified in the stage-directions, but otherwise the set, with its hollow picture-frames and distressed walls, suggests suave elegance on the verge of dissolution.

The two central performances mature into excellence. Dominic West is a fine actor but in the early stages he substitutes vehement intensity for drawling languor and it’s a mistake for him at one point to do a mock fart in the Marquise’s face. But West comes brilliantly into his own in Valmont’s appalled realisation that, although a practised seducer, he is not immune to passion.

Having at first slightly overplayed the Marquise’s studied artifice, as if she were in a Restoration comedy, Janet McTeer also captures superbly the sense of a damaged soul. She delivers the Marquise’s feminist attack on society’s double standards with fierce clarity (“You can ruin us whenever the fancy takes you,” she says of men. “All we can achieve by denouncing you is to enhance your prestige”) and she is filled with insensate fury at Valmont’s seduction of Tourvel. McTeer, in line with the text, shows us a woman who has invented herself struggling to retain control of her own creation.

Elaine Cassidy is equally good as Madame de Tourvel, suggesting the terror that lies behind her surrender to sexual desire: the scene where she collapses in Valmont’s arms with chattering teeth and near-epileptic convulsions is horrifying to witness. Morfydd Clark, in contrast, captures the giddy ecstasy of Cecile’s introduction to the lexicon of sex and Edward Holcroft lends weight to a young Chevalier who finds himself an innocent foot-soldier in an artful campaign. Laclos was himself a military tactician, and what Hampton’s re-creation of the novel brings out with matchless finesse is the self-deluding destructiveness of characters who apply battleground strategies to affairs of the human heart.

At the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 13 February 2016. Box office: 0844 871 7624. Les Liaisons Dangereuses will be broadcast live to more than 650 UK cinemas on 28 January 2016 as part of NT Live.